MANY years ago I worked with a transplanted Englishman, a World War II veteran, who was adamant that the Royal Air Force was literally down to its last Spitfire when the Nazis called off the Battle of Britain.

They were desperate days but the last-Spitfire theory was nonsense, although it expressed something about the prevailing national spirit that made this otherwise intelligent man prey to propaganda.

So, in charity, perhaps we can blame a similar inability to focus on close-up objects for Bob Katter's extraordinary defence of his old boss, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and his former Cabinet colleagues.

Katter, in Kingaroy last week, denounced Liberal National Party leader Campbell Newman for a "dirty, low, filthy act" in suggesting Bjelke-Petersen's government was corrupt.

This "lightweight Johnny-come-lately" was spitting on Joh's grave, he said, which probably goes over well in Kingaroy.

However, it defies belief that, after all these years and all the revelations before, during and after the Fitzgerald inquiry, anyone can say Bjelke-Petersen's government was not corrupt.

It has been variously and thoroughly reported that he was a grifter who was as quick to pick up a loose buck as to extract $400,000 as the price of doing business in his bailiwick.

And that he gathered around him and enriched crooks and cronies, dispensed favours and honours at a price, and punished those who stood up to him.

The petty venality of some of his ministers was legend.

Former spin doctors could lay the aficionados in the aisles with tales of their bosses' blatant greed.

Some of his ministers and functionaries went to jail, one took refuge in the grave and Bjelke-Petersen escaped punishment only by narrowly avoiding being found guilty of perjury through a perversion of the jury system.

Still some, including Katter, would deny this happened.

Others concede corruption was rife but believe it was a worthwhile price for what they, contradictorily, think was good government.

However, Bjelke-Petersen and his cronies learnt their trade while peering enviously through the political fence at a Labor government that thrived for almost 40 years on the manure of what author Evan Whitton called "authoritarianism; intolerance of dissent; union-bashing; politicisation of the police, public servants and the law; rigged electoral system; public and private corruption; agrarian socialism; abuse of the Westminster system; institutionalised ignorance and 'development'".

When Whitton wrote: "It has been said that Sydney is the most corrupt city in the Western world, except of course for Newark, New Jersey, and Brisbane", he could just as easily have been talking of the 1950s as the 1980s.

But, if Labor set the curriculum, some members of the succeeding National Party were honours students and Bjelke-Petersen was the dux.

The past is the past. We can't change it but we shouldn't deny it.

Things did change with the Fitzgerald inquiry but not just because of it.

It is only fair to accept that the next generation of National Party leaders, especially Mike Ahern, the often-unsung hero of reform, might possibly have cleaned their own house.

We will never know.

However, we do know the government of Wayne Goss entrenched that spirit of reform and it seems to have survived pretty well, despite a little backsliding during the contortions of the deal with the police union during the government of Rob Borbidge.

Since then, some of the changes in the make-up, the role and the philosophy of the Crime and Misconduct Commission have been regressive; the police union still has trouble with remembering it is an industrial organisation; some political careers have been shattered by unwise associations; one minister has gone to jail and some MPs, Premier Anna Bligh included, have had troubles with the spirit of declarations of interest.

There is an ongoing inability to differentiate between public and political spending (on both sides of the House) and there have been many appointments that have a whiff of patronage about them.

People still pay for audiences with premiers and de facto opposition leaders and money seems to talk extraordinarily loudly.

Yet, incomplete as it might be, we have some of the country's best legislation regulating lobbyists and we have an integrity commissioner who does a brisk trade advising MPs and others.

Gordon Nuttall was a crooked minister who solicited bribes from mining interests but he was uncovered and sent to jail, something that possibly would not have happened at any time between 1915 and 1987.

If his performance and fate were indicative of something more sinister and widespread, we might equally question the honesty of the mining industry.

During this election, questions of financial probity have not gained the traction you might have expected, but at least they have been raised.

Except for a few meat-headed denialists, Queensland has largely swallowed the bitter truth and changed for the better.

In his recent book, The Australian Moment, George Megalogenis concludes nothing the Labor premiers of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia got up to in the 1980s matched the corruption of Bjelke-Petersen's government in Queensland.

If Katter, who served in that government from 1974 to 1990, still doesn't know what was going on, he must have had his hat pulled down over his eyes and ears.

Or, as Whitton said of Bjelke-Petersen's appearance at the Fitzgerald inquiry, he is relying on the Parrington defence of bottomless stupidity.

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